Lighting

Hi,
I am trying to do lighting in my map, and have encountered a problem. I am using spot lights with a model above it, and obviously it goes down but above it it is pitch black. I have copied the lighting settings from CFT 2 Fort blue resupply room and its lighting is fine. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks for any help,
Buncieboy343

Spotlights only send light in the direction they're pointed. The game does "fake" radiosity in the sense that light doesn't bounce around the way it does in the real world.. a ray of light coming from a lamp tends to only light the first surface it hits and dies there.

To avoid the black hole above the spotlight, you either need to create some ambient lighting with a low power point light, or make a second spotlight pointed upwards towards the first spotlight.

Spotlights only send light in the direction they're pointed. The game does "fake" radiosity in the sense that light doesn't bounce around the way it does in the real world.. a ray of light coming from a lamp tends to only light the first surface it hits and dies there.

Click to expand...

Um.... what? VRAD does too bounce light off surfaces; it's the whole reason the engine uses precompiled lighting in the first place.

However, it's not nearly as accurate if the map is compiled in normal mode. Ask anyone who tried recompiling 2fort from the SDK copy and noticed that the spawn room ceilings were almost pitch black. Compiling in expert mode with -final enabled gets much more even lighting.